‘It’s been an amazing demonstration of the vitality of the democratic process. A record turnout. And the sense therefore that the issues in the election, the issues about the outgoing American administration, have actually stirred the moral imagination of the United States in ways that people didn’t expect. Given the sort of turnout that we have in British elections it would be quite nice to have an election one of these days that stirred our imagination to that extent.’

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In light of Barack Obama’s victory in Tuesday’s presidential election, many people are considering what his election might mean for race relations in America. Reflections from several African-American Baptist ministers suggest that although they see Obama’s election as an important moment, it must be just one step on a longer road toward racial reconciliation.

“The election of Barack is the beginning of a movement toward the unification of a nation and the pulling down of religious, political and social divides that have poisoned the very fabric of our nation,” said William Buchanan, pastor of Fifteenth Avenue Baptist Church in Nashville, Tenn.

“Emotion coursed through my being at the announcement that Barack Obama had become the new president-elect of the United States,” Buchanan told EthicsDaily.com. “The moment was surreal for me, a 61-year-old African-American, who, as a young man in Georgia, witnessed the displacement of my family because of my father’s civic involvement in voter registration for the ”˜Negro.’”

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As a result, the Democratic Party, including Senator Barack Obama, focused heavily on outreach to religious voters, including white evangelicals who voted overwhelmingly for President Bush, and talked more openly than ever before about faith.

So did all the God-talk pay off?

The verdict appears to be mixed, but Mr. Obama does appear to have scored some significant victories, especially among Roman Catholics, according to nationwide surveys of voters leaving the polls on Tuesday and telephone interviews of some people who had voted early.

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Barack Obama may not have been the Catholic hierarchy’s favored candidate in the U.S. presidential race because of his support for abortion rights, but the Vatican on Wednesday (Nov. 5) hailed his election as a “choice that unites.”

“America…is truly the country where everything can happen,” said a front-page editorial in the official Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano. “America is truly the country of the new frontier … able to overcome fractures and divisions that until only recently could seem incurable.”

The article, written by Giuseppe Fiorentino, appeared next to a full-color photo of the Obama family.

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John Green is is senior fellow for religion and American Politics for the Pew Center and one of the absolute top analysts of how religion affects American politics. Less than 9 hours after his first look at the exit poll data late late Tuesday night, he was back on the phone talking to reporters. Iron man!

His take: Comparing the 2004 election to 2008, the biggest shifts were in turnout of blacks, Hispanics and other minorities, and the margins of support for Obama versus Kerry. Ditto about younger voters. So while the exit polls do show shifts within various religious divisions, those changes may be tied directly to those changes in cultural/age/race voting. For instance, younger voters tend to lean to the Democrats, even within otherwise Republican groups. So a modest shift in the white evangelical vote — 3-5% more voted for Obama compared with Kerry 2004 — might be tied more to a higher youth turnout rather than formerly GOP voters going for Obama.

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Nationally, Obama captured 53% of the Catholic vote, a 13-point swing from 2004 and the largest advantage among the group for a Democrat since Bill Clinton. Obama also cut in half the Republican advantage among Protestants. And he made significant gains among regular worship attenders. Voters who attend religious services most frequently are still most likely to cast ballots for Republicans. But Obama won 44% of their votes, a 19-point shift in the category that, after the last presidential contest, inspired pundits to diagnose the existence of a “God gap.” Voters who worship at least once a month preferred Obama 53% to McCain’s 46%.

As in 2006, the least-religious Americans continue to reject the GOP in large numbers. Voters who say they visit houses of worship just a few times a year or not at all made up 44% of the electorate in this election. They gave Obama 59% and 68% of their votes, respectively; both totals represent double-digit increases from four years ago.

And yet despite the inroads Obama made with religious constituencies, there is one voting bloc that remains largely unmoved by Obamamania: white Evangelicals. One-quarter of them voted for Obama on Tuesday ”” despite a warning from conservative columnist Janet Porter that they could be risking their eternal souls by doing so ”” an improvement on John Kerry’s dismal showing in 2004. But against a candidate like McCain, who is famously disliked by many Evangelicals, in a campaign in which Democrats engaged in a record level of outreach to Evangelicals, and at a time when the Evangelical community is expanding its consciousness to focus on traditionally Democratic issues like the environment and poverty, this would have been the year for a real shift of support to take place.

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I thought this was interesting.

More generally, the picture is of a solid Democratic win, but not the tsunami some had expected. Obama won the popular vote by a solid, but not crushing, margin of slightly less than six percent (52.4-46.5). Bill Clinton beat Bob Dole by a significantly greater margin and even greater relative percentage (49.25-40.71), and George Bush by a slightly lower margin, but higher relative percentage (43.01-37.45). Bush, meanwhile, beat Dukakis by a larger margin, 53.4 to 45.6. The Democrats picked up about twenty House seats, on the low end of the expected range. And, as noted above, they seem likely to pick up five or six Senate seats,which would make the Senate races either 18-16 in favor of the Democrats, or tied at 17-17, again on the low end of the expected range.

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Reporting from Washington ”” Barack Obama won the presidency Tuesday by persuading voters to embrace a seeming paradox: leadership based on contradictory principles of change and reassurance.

The Illinois senator combined ambitious goals and a cautious temperament. He promised tax cuts, better healthcare, new energy programs and fiscal discipline all at the same time, and all without the bitterness and stalemate that arose when those issues were tackled in the past.

Now, as Obama moves through his transition to the White House, this effort to square the political circle becomes the defining challenge in the months ahead. Which Barack Obama will dominate as he begins to govern?

Too much of the ambitious liberal, and he rekindles partisan squabbles he was supposed to transcend.

Too much the cautious mediator who reaches across the aisle to compromise with Republicans, and he risks losing the energy and idealism that attracted millions to his candidacy.

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Here is one entry from Michael Knoll in Pennsylvania:

With many of the Bush tax cuts sets to expire in the coming years, the tax system has been described as a jump ball. And President-Elect Obama, who was elected on a platform promising tax cuts for 95 percent of Americans and ambitious plans to increase spending, is poised to grab it. With solid Democratic majorities in the House and Senate, there will be intense pressure on him to move quickly to reverse the Bush tax cuts and to implement his promised tax and spending plans. Yet, prudence dictates not moving too quickly with his tax plan for several reasons. First, a weak economy is not the time to raise taxes on the top 5 percent. The time for tax increases will come when the economy improves. Second, the U.S. government has been running large deficits, which add to the national debt. Once the economy improves, total tax revenues will in all likelihood need to be increased ”“ not only revenues from the top 5 percent ”“ to reduce those deficits. Third, there is substantial dissatisfaction with the existing tax system from many corners. President Bush cut taxes first and then tried to get tax reform. He got his tax cuts, but he made little headway on tax reform having given away all the benefits. By connecting any revenue changes (most likely increases) with tax reform, President Obama will be better able to achieve both. Fourth, the U.S. tax system was designed for a nation where foreign trade and investment constituted a small part of the economy. That is no longer the case, and any major overhaul needs to address squarely the United States’ economic connections with the rest of the world.

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I am interested in who you are and where you live, your thoughts on the outcome and the reason, and particularly your information about your own specific region and the elections and referendum questions there. Once again, please, real names STRONGLY preferred if at all possible.

1. Will President Barack Obama govern as a moderate centrist or a liberal extremist? As the most liberal member of the U.S. Senate, with a background seeped in far-left activism, he does not seem naturally inclined to head to the center without a looming election to force him to accommodate moderate voters. Certainly he now has every opportunity to push through the redistributive agenda he spoke about so fondly in his now-infamous 2001 radio address. He has healthy majorities in both houses of Congress and a wish list built up over eight years ”” with everything from universal health care to abolishing secret ballot union elections to the Freedom of Choice Act.

It would seem to require Herculean strength for a president, especially one relatively new to Washington and with a record of subservience to party orthodoxy, to resist the strong leftward pull. Certainly, Obama presumably wants not just one, but two terms and wants to retain that Congressional majority. And the lesson of 1994 when President Bill Clinton lost his Democratic Congressional majority remains fixed in Democrats’ memories. But it is hard to imagine, even with the financial crisis ”” and the resulting mound of debt and revenue shortfall ”” that Obama will now transform into a protector of free markets and balanced budgets and a bulwark against the phalanx of Democratic special interest groups….

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There are a lot of reasons, but in my view the main ones are these:

The question is: was it more of the former or the latter? My answer is more of the latter. Mr. Obama is for hope and change. But hope for what exactly? Change of what kind exactly? He almost became a Rorschach test on which people projected their various dreams and aspirations. But he mainly won because he is not George Bush. There is really a huge range of possibilities of what kind of a President he will be–he could be very good, or very poor, or many places in between. We shall see. But he–and we–will discover very quickly that governing is MUCH harder than campaigning–KSH.

Sen. Obama and I have had and argued our differences, and he has prevailed. No doubt many of those differences remain.

These are difficult times for our country. And I pledge to him tonight to do all in my power to help him lead us through the many challenges we face.

I urge all Americans who supported me to join me in not just congratulating him, but offering our next president our good will and earnest effort to find ways to come together to find the necessary compromises to bridge our differences and help restore our prosperity, defend our security in a dangerous world, and leave our children and grandchildren a stronger, better country than we inherited.

Whatever our differences, we are fellow Americans. And please believe me when I say no association has ever meant more to me than that.

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This victory alone is not the change we seek. It is only the chance for us to make that change. And that cannot happen if we go back to the way things were.

It can’t happen without you, without a new spirit of service, a new spirit of sacrifice.

So let us summon a new spirit of patriotism, of responsibility, where each of us resolves to pitch in and work harder and look after not only ourselves but each other.

Let us remember that, if this financial crisis taught us anything, it’s that we cannot have a thriving Wall Street while Main Street suffers.

In this country, we rise or fall as one nation, as one people. Let’s resist the temptation to fall back on the same partisanship and pettiness and immaturity that has poisoned our politics for so long.

Let’s remember that it was a man from this state who first carried the banner of the Republican Party to the White House, a party founded on the values of self-reliance and individual liberty and national unity.

Those are values that we all share.

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Some valuable stuff here, such as this:

Brendan Payne in Edmonds, US, says: I voted for McCain and disagree with much of Obama’s policies, but this is an historic day for the United States. Ideology aside, we must come together as Americans to celebrate this great hammer blow against the walls of racism in America.

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…[His] plans are for his campaign to quickly start filling top jobs in the White House and cabinet. Leading the list for White House chief of staff is Chicago Rep. Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s biggest House cheerleader and a former top aide in the Clinton White House. His appointment, say Democratic insiders, could come as early as Wednesday. Also, Obama is considering Sen. John Kerry, the 2004 presidential runner-up, as secretary of state, according to sources.

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CNN projects that Barack Obama will be the nation’s 44th president.

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Whatever thoughts you chose to share. Please if at all possible real names and locations highly preferred.

Check it out. I see over on Intrade that Obama is over 94 and John McCain is down to 6.

For your amusement, I report that the State of New York has ELEVEN Parties on the ballot: Republican, Democrat, Independence, Conservative, Working Families, Socialist Labor, another party with socialist in the title, Green (Cynthia McKinney), Libertarian (Bob Barr), and Populist (Ralph Nader.) McCain/Palin appear on 3 of the first four; and the Democrats and Working Families have Obama/Biden. I’d never heard of the two candidates who’ve been nominated by the two socialist parties.

–From one in the stream of emails today

What we are unlikely to see over the next four years is progress on serious defects in the press and the electoral process that this election revealed.

It is ironic that in 2008 we probably have two of the most honest and decent men running for president that we have had in a long time, and yet this has easily been the most corrupt election in my lifetime.

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Bishop Ronald Gainer said Monday that he wrote a letter stressing the church’s stance on abortion to the Lexington Diocese because he felt that too many Catholic politicians had misstated key Catholic teachings.

On Sunday, 64 parishes in the Lexington Diocese were read a letter written by Gainer that stressed that issues about the sanctity of life ”” including abortion ”” are morally more important than other political issues.

The letter, Gainer said Monday, was in response to several letters to the editor and statements made by Catholic politicians on a key Catholic document related to voting and citizenship.

“I mention no party and mention no candidates,” Gainer said of his letter. “Our policy is that we are non-partisan but principled.”

Read it all and the letter itself is there.

Florida has only voted for one Democratic presidential candidate since backing Jimmy Carter in 1976 – Bill Clinton in 1996. Even then, Clinton only received 48 percent of the vote. President Bush carried Florida by only 537 votes in the 2000 election that took five weeks to sort out.

While Bush won by a more comfortable 381,000 votes in 2004, this year’s race is expected to be much closer. Since 2004, Democrats have added 461,000 voters to their rolls, compared to 172,000 more Republicans. And the number of black voters, who overwhelmingly vote Democratic, has increased by about 250,000 since 2004.

The campaigns are also competing for Florida’s nearly 1.4 million Hispanic voters, as well as large blocks of Jewish and elderly voters.

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Nov. 4, 2008, is a historic day because it marks the end of an economic era, a political era and a generational era all at once.

Economically, it marks the end of the Long Boom, which began in 1983. Politically, it probably marks the end of conservative dominance, which began in 1980. Generationally, it marks the end of baby boomer supremacy, which began in 1968. For the past 16 years, baby boomers, who were formed by the tumult of the 1960s, occupied the White House. By Tuesday night, if the polls are to be believed, a member of a new generation will become president-elect.

So today is not only a pivot, but a confluence of pivots.

When historians look back at the era that is now closing, they will see a time of private achievement and public disappointment. In the past two decades, the United States has become a much more interesting place. Companies like Starbucks, Apple, Crate & Barrel, Microsoft and many others enlivened daily life. Private citizens, especially young people, repaired the social fabric, dedicated themselves to community service and lowered drug addiction and teenage pregnancy.

Yet, at the same time, the public sphere has not flourished.

Overly dire, in my view, forgetting too much the capacity (or at least the possibility for the capacity) present for renewal culturally and innovation educationally and politicially. In any event, read it all.

At least one broadcast network and one Web site said Monday that they could foresee signaling to viewers early Tuesday evening which candidate appeared to have won the presidency, despite the unreliability of some early exit polls in the last presidential election.

A senior vice president of CBS News, Paul Friedman, said the prospects for Barack Obama or John McCain meeting the minimum threshold of electoral votes could be clear as soon as 8 p.m. ”” before polls in even New York and Rhode Island close, let alone those in Texas and California. At such a moment, determined from a combination of polling data and samples of actual votes, the network could share its preliminary projection with viewers, Mr. Friedman said.

“We could know Virginia at 7,” he said. “We could know Indiana before 8. We could know Florida at 8. We could know Pennsylvania at 8. We could know the whole story of the election with those results. We can’t be in this position of hiding our heads in the sand when the story is obvious.”

Ugh. It will be a real shame if they do. Read it all.

Obama 92.5, McCain 8

Voters across our community, state and nation will have their say today. The decisions that are made in the polling places, for all levels of government, will have lasting consequences. So choose wisely.

Over the past week, we’ve identified the candidates and referendums we support and the reasons for our choices. We’ve made those decisions on a race-by-race basis, picking a mix of Republicans, Democrats and Independents in the process. We suggest that you also consider each candidate on his or her own merits, regardless of party.

But if you do vote a straight-party ticket, remember that you must still make individual decisions to have your voice heard in the nonpartisan school-board elections and those referendum questions.

And regardless of whether you agree with our arguments or follow our advice, exercise your self-governing right ”” and obligation ”” by casting informed votes.

A review of our endorsements….

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